CLUSTER_DATABASE=FALSE

At that point I stopped for a second to wonder if the second parameter was required… It seems logical that if the database is not in a cluster then you wouldn’t need to tell Oracle how many database are in the cluster…

I didn’t have opportunity to test it at the time, but a SEV 1 a few days later put me in a position of attempting to start a RAC database in single instance mode and give me the perfect chance to find out…

The database in question was running on 9.2.0.8, but showed the same behaviour as the output below (generated on version 11.1.0.7):